


It's The Quiet Night That Breaks Me

by CupidStrikes



Series: Keith Week 2016 [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Pining kinda, Sheith if you squint, light mentions of compulsive behaviour, light mentions of mental health issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8164772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CupidStrikes/pseuds/CupidStrikes
Summary: The sun rises, peaks, and then sets again, and still there is no Shiro, and the shack is silent save for his stilted breathing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> September 29th: Isolation | Fire
> 
> CW - some compulsive behaviour, light mentions of disassociation and panic attacks.
> 
> Lyrics are Vanilla Twilight by Owl City.

 

 

**It's The Quiet Night That Breaks Me**

  


_I'll forget the world that I knew_

_But I swear I won't forget you_

  


Keith lights a candle nearly every day after Shiro is declared missing.

  


He's never been a believer in spirits or ghosts, and certainly not in gods and angels, but something about this feels cathartic and once he starts he can't quite bring himself to stop.

  


The first is a candle someone gives him at the memorial. He had gone to the Garrison to attend a class, but his feet take him to the small table set up in the foyer. He looks over the photos of the three missing men there, and his fingers find the edge of the edge of Shiro's. It's a photo he hates; the smile he's wearing seems stilted and all wrong when Keith has seen the genuine article up close and even the photos he has tucked away in the scrapbook Shiro had given him don't quite do it justice. He remembers the two of them laughing about it when the Garrison had picked it for the press release when the mission to Kerberos had first been announced. Shiro had complained it made him look old before his time. Now, Keith finds himself wondering what Shiro might have looked like, in his thirties and beyond, when and where his dark hair would come to be shot through with silver.

  


Keith twitches back into the present as he realises someone is stood watching him. He jerks his hand back from the photo frame as if burnt, and the sharp movement sends it clattering onto his front. Keith isn't easily flustered, but his hand shakes as he reaches to right it. The other person steps forward and lifts it before he reaches it, however, and he looks up at their face for the first time.

  


The girl (or young woman, Keith has always been a terrible judge of age), looks oddly familiar and he can't place it. She smiles at him just a little bit and it's like Shiro's Garrison photo again; rehearsed, too perfect.

  


“They're not gone.”

  


Keith hadn't expected her to speak and he startles at the sound of her voice.

  


“What?”

  


She purses her lips and reaches for one candle on the table that has somehow remained unlit and passes it in between her hands.

  


“You feel it too, don't you?”

  


She doesn't look at him, but somehow Keith feels like he is being watched. He shifts his footing and looks back at the photos.

  


“Yeah,”

  


He mutters it, and isn't even sure the girl had heard it at all until something taps his arm and he turns to see her holding the candle out to him. For lack of a better action he takes it.

  


“I'm going to find the truth. Don't give up,”

  


Keith narrows his eyes and stares at the candle until the burning in the corners of his eyes has faded, but when he looks back up the girl has gone. He looks around but sees no trace of her, and when he strains to hear footsteps, he only hears approaching voices, and he leaves before anyone else can see him here.

  


He doesn't light the candle that night, or the night after that, but does so a week and a half later, when dusk has fallen after a thunderstorm and the first stars have blinked into life through the clouds above the shack he and Shiro had made a home.

  


He seldom sleeps in his dorm room now. Can't recall the last time he saw his roommate. None of it matters.

  


He lights the candle and leaves it on the scratched up desk in the corner, clearing a space between the books and spacecraft models Shiro had left. Keith falls asleep sat at the window, and when he wakes with the sunrise he finds the wick still lit. The night when the wax has nearly all melted, and the wick is too burnt to light is the first night that Keith lets himself cry. It's messy, and he skips all his classes the next day in favour of lying on his side on the sofa and staring out of one of the windows as the sun rises, peaks, and then sets again, and still there is no Shiro, and the shack is silent save for his stilted breathing.

  


Keith is kicked out of the Galaxy Garrison program one week later for telling a senior officer to 'shove his piloting career up his arse'. It is the last in a string of outbursts and threats, but Keith refuses to allow them to groom him into taking Shiro's place. Nothing will fill the Shiro-shaped hole in his life, and it makes Keith blotchy and trembling with rage at the thought of anyone, let alone himself, pretend they could even try to hold a candle to what Shiro had been, pilot, student, mentor, or friend.

  


He leaves immediately, taking only the clothes on his back and his bike, and settles up in the shack in the desert and begins working. He leaves whatever is left of his few belongings in his dorm room. On his next trip into the small town nearby Keith buys more candles. Damn near clears out the only store that sells them, and soon the desk and every other available surface is covered in them. At night they twinkle and glow around him like captured stars.

  


He works odd jobs about town: fixing up cars, bikes, old machinery, remembers enough from classes to get by, and he dedicates every spare moment to Kerberos. It's attracted conspiracy theorists, sure, (and the thought of it being an orchestrated crash makes Keith feel physically sick), but as time goes on interest wanes, and Keith finds himself going out less and less as the information dries up and he has to try vaguer and more obscure leads and possibilities. He's mapped out the reconstruction so many times that his dreams have become objective, disconnected, a removed discourse of the events, from the nightmares fraught with screaming and fragments of the space ship floating out into the far reaches of space and on and on to the clutches of the end of the universe.

  


It is eight months to the day after contact was lost with the Kerberos mission, and seven months, three weeks and a day since Keith left the Garrison, when the old police dispatch radio in the corner finally picks up a signal after months of nothing but the odd petty thief or road offence.

  


The transmission is punctuated with static, which is to be expected, and the frequency is nothing close to the usual channels, but bursts of clarity filter through the white noise: roars, what sounds like a strangely mechanic purring, and something high-pitched that makes Keith wince even as he feels goosebumps raising all over his skin. For the first time since the punch-in-the-gut of the news that Shiro was Missing in Action, Keith acutely feels the loss, and longing, that he's not sure how he stays upright as he crosses the room to turn the radio off. This is what is giving him hope - a bizarre, likely coincidental or accidental reaction of electricity or malfunctioning equipment. Keith is completely on his own in his search for a man that might not have been alive for the past eight months, or seven, or six, and Keith still doesn't know for all his thinking and work, whether it's better he finds conclusive proof that Shiro is dead, or nothing at all, or maybe Shiro will come back in flesh and bond but without the soul and mind and heart and everything that makes up Takashi Shirogane, and it is this thought that has Keith clutching at his chest and wondering, calm amidst his body's clamouring for air, if he might just die first, suffocating on the empty desert air, and wouldn't that just be the icing on the fucking cake?

  
He grabs at the radio in a moment of clear thought, and yanks the power cord out of the socket and with the renewed silence the sensation is broken, and Keith sinks back down onto the sofa, feeling as if something had reached in and rearranged his insides. His throat is hoarse and dry, as if he had been screaming, and Keith realises he may well have been; there is nothing and no one out here to give him feedback on such a thing, and he wonders, not for the first time, if he isn't going a little crazy out here. He laughs, lets the sound rebound off the walls and echo back distorted, and lets himself entertain those crazy thoughts then, and the thrumming sensation in his ribs comes back full-force unbidden, and with a sensation that is at once familiar and completely alien;

  


Something was waiting for him.

  


He drags himself off the sofa and grabs at a pen, bringing his laptop closer as he tracks the frequency location to within a 50-mile radius. It'll do. He'll entertain the gut feeling for lack of anything better.

  


Keith is out of the door and speeding across the desert in minutes, and after a few miles he discards his map and compass. He's sure he's completely lost it by now, but he's had no leads in weeks and he's willing to give anything a shot. If it leads nowhere, then, well, he's lost nothing but time and possibilities, and those he has in spades.

  


That night Keith finds the cave of The Blue Lion, and the knowledge comes to him as second-nature and certain as the constellations navigating him home:

 

Shiro will come back to him

 

and with this Keith’s search begins anew, focussed on the cave in the middle of nowhere that draws him back until Keith can draw out each scene and mural from memory alone and when he dreams he dreams no longer of the Kerberos ship exploding, of screams and blood and what might remain of Shiro, but of wings and a being that is the brightest blue Keith ever remembers seeing.

 

Keith doesn't believe in gods or in spirits, but he clings to the belief that the Blue Lion in the paintings has some semblance of truth, and his search begins anew.

 

_But drenched in vanilla twilight_

_I'll sit on the front porch all night_

_Waist deep in thought because when_

_I think of you I don't feel so alone._


End file.
